Hi everyone, a warm welcome to this very interesting afternoon with Acast. My name is Annika Billberg, and this is my colleague, Patrick Elo, and we will be your hosts for today. The plan is for all of you that have an interest in the world of podcasting, to get a deeper insight into, our world and the value that we create for podcast creators, advertisers, and in the end, of course, you as an investor.
We have some great people with us today who will hopefully be able to answer all of your questions. We will open up for questions after each speaker. If you participate via telephone, you will be able to ask your questions live, or you can post your questions in the message box below. First up is our CEO, Ross Adams, who's connecting from the Acast studio in New York. Welcome, Ross.
Hi, everyone. Great to be here. I've just moved actually to Connecticut, so not too far from our New York office, and although I'm still getting to know things this side of the pond, I have to say it's been fantastic and a lot of fun for myself and my family so far. Of course, the main reason I've moved here is because Acast is making great strides in the U.S., and we wanna double down on that. We have had historical record ad sales growth here, more U.S. podcasts than ever on our books, and more people listening to our network of shows. I've moved here to maintain and supercharge this growth, as well as helping our tech leadership team in the region. The U.S. is a podcasting haven and home to some of the best shows around.
There is so much more we can do and will be doing here for podcasters and advertisers alike as the market evolves. Overall, the opportunity for podcasting is massive. We all know the TAM is huge, and the medium itself is massively under-monetized. We at Acast have established a unique position in our markets and have a unique ability to leverage our technology to solve the friction points of the industry at scale. We have done heavy investments to date and can now focus our business and deliver profits in 2024. Let's not forget that we are well-financed and have a strong balance sheet too. While the macro context and capital markets are volatile at present, the fundamental growth levers I see for our business are strong, and we have a healthy business and very exciting prospects for the many years ahead.
Good. Ross, you have been CEO for Acast since 2017, and this has been an interesting journey. Many of us are still new to the idea of monetizing on podcasts. You said that Acast is a WordPress of podcasting. Could you first just briefly explain what you mean by that?
Yeah, absolutely. I think using the internet as a comparison is a great way to help explain our business model and how the industry works as a whole. Take WordPress as an example. This example, by the way, only explains part of our business model. For example, as a creator, if they have an idea for a new website, WordPress, of course, would allow them to bring that idea to life by giving them a home, a platform to host that website on. HTML then allows them to make that website accessible to people across every different web browser out there. It doesn't matter who wants to visit, wherever they are in the world, and whatever browser they prefer. There are no walls, and that means the website creator reaches as many people as possible.
In podcasting, or at least in the open podcasting ecosystem that Acast champions and supports, it's much the same situation. We sit in the same place as WordPress, which is right at the heart of it all. Our marketplace connects the entire value chain. We host podcasts made by independent creators, publishers, and networks on our platform, and we use RSS, which is the HTML of podcasting, to make their shows available across any and every listening app and device there is, which gets their content into the ears of millions of people all around the world. We give them easy-to-use tools and the insights and analytics they need to grow on a global scale. When it comes to monetization, we connect them with advertisers and help them to generate income directly from their listeners through subscriptions and one-time payments powered by our own technology, Acast+.
Once again, thanks to the open ecosystem, we're able to make sure they're making money on all their listens, no matter where they're listening.
In this context, Acast has managed to gain a position where we generate revenues from business advertising and podcasts. What kind of advertising is it that generates revenues?
Okay. Yeah. We offer three core advertising products, and these are broken down into ads, sponsorship, and branded content. Ads are short 30-second spots in a similar style to those you're used to hearing on commercial radio. Thanks to our position in market, all our ads are automatically dynamically inserted throughout our entire catalog. Dynamic ad insertion in podcasting is, in fact, something that we at Acast pioneered. We invented the technology back in 2014 because we had to. It didn't yet exist in podcasting when we disrupted it. That means that brand messages from Acast advertising partners can be heard anywhere and everywhere podcasts are listened to. If a listener opens their favorite podcast on Spotify, and it's hosted by Acast, the ads they hear have been sold and inserted by us at Acast.
It's the same if they're on Apple, Google, or wherever. If you're hearing an ad on an Acast-hosted show, we and the creator are making money on it, and our ads can be sold directly, programmatically or via our new self-serve platform. This is where we see huge upside for Acast. It's worth pointing out that we also sell ads on some huge podcasts that are not hosted by Acast. For example, we sell ads in the UK for The New York Times, including on The Daily, the world's most popular podcast, and a global smash hit, Serial. Sponsorship is where the host of a podcast talks about a brand's product or services in the voice and style their listeners know, love and trust. It's a direct endorsement by a creator. It's a native ad, if you will.
Their loyal, engaged audience are listening to that. It's a truly immersive advertising experience in a medium where listeners are fully leaned in. Branded content takes things a step further, with brands buying out larger sections of the podcast industry and in inventory. That could be a full branded segment within an episode or an entire branded episode. For example, where the food podcast, Table Manners, tests out the new range from a supermarket, Sainsbury's, or the sustainable milk brand Oatly co-creates an episode on the environment with Somna med Henrik. We have a dedicated creative team who make that content perform as well as possible, and who also help brands create their own podcast from scratch.
We have some fantastic examples of fully branded podcasts that are renewed season after season with brands such as the Sky-owned entertainment brand NOW or tech giant Samsung, such is their success with their listeners.
That's how it works.
Yep.
Could you tell us a bit about the market potential that you see?
Yeah, of course. Podcasting has grown rapidly, but there's still huge potential room for further growth. Looking at the audio more broadly, there's around $30 billion spent on advertising in audio every single year. Right now, podcasts are taking a relatively small chunk of that. Podcasts are expected to hit between $4 billion-$6 billion in the next 3-5 years. As my colleague Elli will explain later, those numbers don't line up. When you look at the number of people actually listening to podcasts and the total time they spend listening every single week, the investment from advertisers should be much, much higher than it is already.
The exciting thing is that this means that there's huge opportunity to move more advertising dollars from other forms of audio into podcasts as the industry continues to scale and grow. Acast, of course, is uniquely positioned to do this and to take market share in the years to come. Our offering puts podcasters first and makes them as much money as possible through advertising, which is a win-win for podcasters and advertisers alike. It's why so many creators are coming to Acast and why so many advertisers trust us with their investment.
Sounds good. In the Q2 report, you said that Acast has reached an inflection point.
Yeah
that a period of heavy investments have come to an end. We are now in a position to reach profitability already in 2024. What is it that put Acast in this position? What have we done to get there?
Well, of course, a lot of hard work has gone into it, not just since our IPO last year, but of course, in the last eight years since we were founded. We built from the ground up the infrastructure required for podcasters and advertisers to meet, and that included being first to market with dynamic ad insertion for podcasts, which changed the game and made it so much easier, both for podcasters to monetize and for advertisers to buy the podcast space. We essentially turned an analog medium into a digital one. That made Acast an attractive place for podcasters to be part of, and we quickly grew our portfolio of shows into the thousands. Over the past year in particular, however, we've made a big effort to grow that number faster than ever before.
When we went public in June 2021, Acast was the home to just under 30,000 podcasts. At the most recent count at the end of Q2, that number was 66,000 with 1.2 billion listens per quarter. We've doubled our portfolio size and inventory available to advertisers in just a year. That number also continues to grow quarter-over-quarter. We invested in a series of very successful marketing campaigns to persuade new and existing podcasters to join Acast, while at the same time focusing on the tools and services we know will keep them around. Our churn is extremely low, because we really are the best at what we do, getting podcasts out there into the world and helping podcasters grow on a global scale and making them as much money as possible.
Alongside the growth of our podcast portfolio, we've also been focused on getting more advertisers all around the world to spend with Acast. Throughout the year, nearly 2,500 different advertisers buy ads on Acast shows. That is once again the result of a lot of effort from our global sales teams. We work hard to consistently grow our network of advertising partners and to educate the market, especially those who are unsure and haven't spent on podcast advertising before, on why this is such an effective media channel. Just like we create new tools for podcasters to make more money, we're continuously expanding our ad offering to help advertisers get real bang for their buck. While our ads sponsorship and branded content offering remains the core of what we do, we're innovating within that.
The most recent being the introduction of conversational targeting capabilities. To explain a little, about this, if you picture how Google's AdSense matches ads to your website based on your specific content on that site, our conversational targeting capability is just as granular as that. It allows brands to place ads around specific conversations happening across our podcasts, and Elli will explain on these kinds of innovations more a little later. A lot of work has gone into getting us to this position, but we're only really just getting started.
Great. We have done a lot of things.
Yeah.
Yeah. Why are we now at this inflection point? Where's the proof that we can make it happen now?
Yeah. well we feel we're at a point where we can be very focused in the way we develop our products and where we can become even more efficient in areas like sales, marketing, HR, general admin, and so on. We recently communicated that we're going to reduce our cost base, which of course, was a very difficult decision to make, but we feel it's necessary. It's also a natural step for companies that are growing rapidly. We know thanks to all the hard work we've put in up to now, we're now able to work in such a much more efficient manner. Of course, we owe it to our shareholders to get to profitability as soon as we can. I've got a couple of interesting slides actually to show you on that.
First, this is an illustrative example of what our podcast portfolio looks like today. We call this the head, the heart, and the tail. The head are those big well-known shows that command the most revenue, mostly in the form of direct sales. There are a smaller number of them, but they're disproportionately successful. They're the big shows, the big advertisers, the big agencies want to be associated with. We have the heart, and this is where we see huge potential. These shows are attractive to smaller advertisers like SMEs and want to access the podcast medium but may have fewer resources. These shows and their audiences also typically come with a higher ROI for advertisers. The larger shows are great for reach and scale, but these shows right at the heart offer outstanding engagement and ROI for advertisers.
Our opportunity here is how we automate and scale selling these shows, and we have a self-serve solution for it, that my colleague Matt will tell you about, later on. The main point, though, I want to make is that we have huge potential to increase the revenue from all three of these groups. The purple lines on this slide here are a representation, basically, of where the shows are not being monetized. If we look at how we stand today, you can see that our revenue is very much centralized around media agencies and big brands buying our biggest shows. They buy directly through our sales teams and also via programmatic. We have a lot of opportunity to improve and work on how we sell across the board. We think this is a super exciting opportunity.
Even if we weren't increasing the number of podcasts, and therefore our total ad inventory stays the same, we'd still be able to grow our revenue from where we are today by selling across more different podcasts and thereby increasing sell-through rates and ad loads. Emily will dive into this in a bit.
Great. Really interesting. Lots of potential still. This summer, you also announced the acquisition of Podchaser.
Yeah.
which is the world's largest database.
Yes.
From what I can understand, every single podcast there is can be found in the Podchaser database. Right. Could you explain how this acquisition fits into the equation?
Yeah, of course. Actually, my colleague Matt is gonna speak a little more about how we're getting started to integrate Podchaser and everything it can do, but the top line is that Podchaser is the world's largest, most comprehensive and most authoritative podcast database. We think it's a really strong acquisition for both our podcasters and our advertisers alike. Podchaser's CEO, Bradley Davis, and his team have built an incredible database from scratch, and we're really looking forward to working together. So for Acast, this acquisition actually strengthens our position as the world's largest independent podcast company. Podchaser is a vital asset in our mission to continue driving innovation, and our position within the open podcasting ecosystem, and that will happen in three key ways, through discoverability, dollars, and data. First, enhancing discoverability.
Podchaser will allow our podcasts to be more visible to more listeners, helping drive their growth and monetization goals. Secondly, dollars. Podchaser's SaaS-based structure adds additional revenue and to strengthen Acast's own business model. Thirdly, rich advertising data. Our advertisers will benefit from superior performance metrics, enabling them to more efficiently reach their valuable audiences. This combined with our own set gives us the richest pool of data in the industry, giving advertisers even more options to spend. All in all, it's a move that we believe will set both companies up for long-term success. Like I said, Matt's got much more on that for you shortly.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for this.
Pleasure.
We would now like to open up for questions from the audience, if you have any incoming call or something in writing. Yes.
Yeah. Actually, we do have some questions from the message board, and we encourage, of course, everyone to ask your questions when you have Ross available, and take the chance. Ross, there is one question here from Sarah. Why the need to buy Podchaser? Why not instead just simply plug it in like all the others do?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. Of course, yes, we could just plug into Podchaser. But plugging into Podchaser would only take us so far. Short term, we see huge opportunities to enhance ad sales, package and sell more shows through Podchaser data and direct more ads towards more shows. So basically increase our current ad inventory. If you look at the long term, what we see is an incredible opportunity to create value for both businesses. Matt will come onto this, I think in a bit, but it's around our value creation flywheel, where we create value for the entire podcasting ecosystem.
U sing that data will lift our ad capacities at the same time improving the Podchaser algorithm, which benefits the entire industry as well as benefiting us. The more you put into it, the more you get out, and the more granular our targeting is towards the likes of our advertisers.
Okay, great. I think we also have a question from the teleconference, if the moderator want to step in.
If there are any questions on the phone, so please dial zero one on your telephone keypads now to enter the queue. If you find your question is answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial zero two to cancel. Yes, we have one question so far, and that comes from the line of Dennis Berggren of Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good day. I was wondering about if you could perhaps give an update on the revenue split by ad format. How are these sort of channels trending and why is that regarding sales channels? How much of audio ads are programmatic and self-serve sales respectively?
Yeah.
If you could add just some figures around that. Thank you.
Yeah. I think we'll touch on some of this later on in the presentation, but you know, the three ad formats, it of course differs by market. You know, we see huge opportunity in every single one. And whilst I can't tell you exactly how it breaks down right now by each individual format we see huge opportunities. So ads, for example, scaling that through programmatic and delivering ads across all of our shows is an incredibly scalable product. I think when you look at self-serve, the interesting area here is if you look at the native podcast format, which is the host read at the moment, there's a big focus on larger shows because it's a very kind of manual lift.
The self-serve product that we have built and are developing is super interesting in making this a very scalable product and scaling this across our shows where we see a massive opportunity to give advertisers the kind of maximum ROI. We see a huge kind of opportunity and uplift in all of our formats. It does differ by market. Inherently between ads and sponsorship, it kind of normally flips kind of 50/50 in where the revenue lies. Branded content is becoming quite an interesting part of our mix, if that helps answer your question, Dennis.
It does. I'm entirely on your page regarding the potential for these sales channels as well. What I was looking for is really sort of how much on a total basis is actually from self-serve and programmatic sales as of today.
Yeah. I mean, self-serve is still very early days, but I think programmatic, whilst it's not yet significant part of our business, i.e., it's not beyond the 10% level, it's growing very, very quickly. I'm sure Emily will come on to answering that question in more detail in her section.
Perfect. Thank you.
Pleasure.
Thank you. Once again, if there are any further questions, please dial zero one on your telephone keypads now.
Okay, I think there is one more question.
Yep, we have one further question. It comes from the line of Richard Kramer. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hey, Ross.
Hey, Richard.
Good to see you. All right. It's strange looking at the sync on the webcast and asking a question at the same time. It's a little bit off. My question is about next year-
Yeah
You know, I think a lot of the thinking from the advertising industry is that we're heading into some advertising recession.
Yeah.
You put up a slide about how many shows you have that are just not monetized at all.
Yeah.
How are you balancing sort of price floors, what in terms of engaging new audiences or new advertiser cohorts to get onto the platform, how do you see what might be a very difficult year next year? Maybe that's something Emily will come onto in her outlook with having all this under-monetized inventory.
Yeah. Emily will come onto that in more detail. I think we see different signs in different markets. We notice this kind of macroeconomic environment hitting kinda towards the end of Q1 in Europe, and then Q2, we talked about that hitting the likes of U.S. It does hit different parts of our markets at different times. However, I think if you look at the under-monetized industry, this is why we are aiming resources at the likes of self-serve. This is the ability to start to fill up that inventory in a lot more efficient manner and actually giving advertisers the opportunity to buy in an automated way.
Programmatic, I see, is a really exciting opportunity, which Elli will talk about in a second, as to how we can start to look at those sell-through rates. You know, we always need to stay kind of slightly ahead on the amount of inventory. We never want to get to the stage where we're 100% sold through, 'cause then you start to have pockets of inventory where-
Mm.
It becomes very difficult to maintain advertiser relationships because there clearly will be areas sold out, and demand will be higher than we've got. We need to always stay quite far ahead, but we've got a lot of opportunity, and actually I do see, while there are tough times all around us right now and ahead, podcasting is a growing market. You know, the latest report said from I think it was that it's growing 15% this year. We are in a growing market even in an economic downturn, so we see opportunity within that, and if we create the right tools and the right efficiencies, we should take more than our fair share.
Okay, thanks.
Pleasure.
Great. We have some more questions from the message board here. Derek at ABG is wondering, "How has competition evolved over the last year? Is the slowdown in organic growth over the last quarters partly related to fiercer competition and the US market being more challenging than you had anticipated, or is it purely about macro?
I think it's purely about macro at this point. You know, of course, competition is fairly fierce, especially in the likes of markets like the U.S. If you look at the European markets, we dominate in the markets we're in, so U.K., Sweden, where we represent 60%+ of the ecosystem there. It's about trying to repeat that success over here, but the U.S. is a very competitive market, and I think it is the macroeconomic environment that's really affected the industry as a whole, not necessarily the competition.
What we need to do as a business is continue to develop the right products for the right advertisers and creators, and find efficiencies within that which we are starting to do with what we're developing.
Great. We also have a few questions from Emily Johnson. First one being, "Can you give some more color on why Podchaser makes Acast podcasts more discoverable? Is this specific to Acast or a comment on the industry more in general?
I think if you look at Podchaser, there's many ways that we can use it, but actually plugging in more data that we see at our side helps to make their algorithm even better, right? And if it comes down to discovery of course you have users going on there creating playlists, creating and discovering new content that's similar. You know, you've got to remember that Podchaser plugs into lots of different podcatchers out there and starts to see lots of listening data from those different podcatchers, so it gets a good view of the market and in return passes back data of similar shows that listeners should be listening to. You know, being on Podchaser and being plugged in helps make your show a lot more discoverable.
In turn, if you think about the two things that podcasters want, they want revenue and growth in audience. Those are the two areas that they really want to excel at. Podchaser enables not only your show to be found easier for advertisers, but helps you discover it for listeners too, and therefore grow your audience and grow your revenue opportunity.
Great. Another question from Emily is, "You showed a really interesting chart with the volume of shows that Acast still has left to monetize.
Yep.
What is the revenue potential today if you brought all the purple not-monetized podcasts up to the average for their size currently? Why are there so many not monetized currently? How long is the lag between signing a podcast and monetization being fully ramped?
It depends on product and ad format, to be honest, how quick you can monetize that unsold inventory. Emily's gonna talk more in detail about that, so some of this question she'll answer actually for you there. If you think about it, when you know you sign a podcast, firstly you need to make sure it's discoverable by your ad technology. From a host read perspective, you need to make sure that it is discoverable when you have a brief from an advertiser. Whereas if you look at the likes of ads you can switch on instantly. As long as the podcaster has laid their ad settings down, we can instantly start to monetize it from day one.
There is a huge opportunity here that we see, and you know, we need growth in audience before we start to catch up in growth in revenue. You know, this gives us a huge opportunity moving forward.
Great. Last question from Emily is, "What is the sell-through rate for the group inventory now versus at the IPO?
Again, that's something that Emily will be able to cover in her presentation in just a second.
Great. I think that we are out of questions for the time being at least.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you so much, Ross. This was really interesting.
Thank you.
Next up is Matt MacDonald. First, we are going to look at a short film.
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All right, great. Some examples of fantastic podcasts that are available through the Acast platform. Now we're up to, we're going to connect with our Chief Product Officer, Matt MacDonald. Hi there, Matt.
Hello.
How are you today?
I'm well, thank you.
Excellent. You're the Chief Product Officer, and we look forward to hear a bit more about what you and your teams have been working on in the past few years. My first question to you is, why is it that podcast creators choose to come to Acast?
Yeah, sure. Well, first, thanks for having me, and I'm so excited to share what we're doing within product here at Acast. To set some context, for over the past 15 years, I've been working in the podcasting industry, and I've probably talked to thousands and thousands of podcasters over that time. Really there are kind of two key things that I hear from them over and over again, and they really don't change. It's help me grow my audience and help me make more money. Acast is very good at doing both of those things, and the numbers don't lie. We built and nurtured the podcasting industry by generating 4.8 billion listens per year, and to date, by paying out almost $200 million to creators, and that's more than any other independent company.
One of the things that makes podcasting so brilliant is that it was built on open standards powered by RSS technology. This is podcasting's core strength, openness. This also means that many companies can and have entered into the space, as the barriers to entry have been lower than in other media. While entry can be easy, succeeding and thriving, that is an entirely different story. The companies that win in this industry are the ones which attract and retain podcasters by offering the best solutions which create the outcomes that they're looking for. Again, that's helping them grow their audience and helping them make money. Acast's own core strength has been superb service, both in our ability to attract the best high-profile podcasters, but also in our continued demonstrated ability to help podcasters make money over the past eight years.
Our sales and product teams on the ground in 14 markets deeply understand the local landscape, and that creates an advantage for us to understand both the motivations of podcaster talent so that we can attract the cool kids, but also what advertisers and direct response agencies and holding companies each need.
More on how we managed to actually build a network of 66,000 shows already, and also what we did to make this platform so attractive to podcasters.
Yeah, sure. Bringing more podcasters, which is the supply for our marketplace, into Acast, happens in two primary ways. First, we use manual, less scalable efforts to attract the big names. These are the tentpole shows that make Acast the cool place where all the other podcasters wanna be, whether that's Marc Maron in the U.S. or Värvet in Sweden or any other of our thousands of big-name podcasters. We also use automated, highly scalable acquisition efforts to attract podcasters too. In Q2 this year alone, those efforts brought in 19,000 new shows, and that represents more than 100% growth year-over-year.
Now, those super strengths, international talent acquisition and ad sales, scale up only so far, and that's where our product engineering and design teams come into play to help identify and supercharge these human-to-human efforts into more scalable ones. To attract podcasters at scale, we created focused measurable experiments across our entire podcaster acquisition process, so we can test, learn, iterate, and improve, and it's driven by our product and marketing. These experiments helped us find what works best and how those findings can be repeated and automated. We tested things like different language for calls to action on Acast.com, removing or deferring steps needed to get started with Acast, and the impact of specific local language translations, as well as response to our A/B testing and our switch to Acast emails, as well as design and copy for our performance marketing campaigns.
All of this supply acquisition work from our product teams and future acquisition efforts are done with automation in mind, so that when we see a desired result and our goals being met, we can pivot our focus to the ads demand side of the marketplace, critically also without turning off that supply tap. Not only did these experiments generate the results that we wanted, but they also brought us valuable organizational insights for how it is that we can create a test, learn, iterate, and improve culture and mindset, which helps us continue to scale either a supply or a demand problem.
Now, after we've brought significant new supply to the marketplace, more podcasters. Our focus has shifted to getting the right podcasters on Acast while continuing to do so at scale. These podcasters that we pull in, we want them to grow an audience and monetize via our ads marketplace and make money directly from their fans through Acast+. Again, we've already identified and removed a number of critical friction points and now have a much faster, much simpler, more nimble onboarding process for podcasters and a far clearer product value proposition on Acast.com. Both of these things have led to even better sign-up conversion rates. Part of what we mean by the right podcasters are those who will join our ads marketplace and those who advertisers want to work with, and those who will provide a better yield to Acast.
Also, before I forget, another key way for us to increase supply is for the podcasters that are already on Acast to publish even more episodes and to do so more regularly. We've created the tools to help them do so. One successful example in place to help grow our supply is our partnership with the audio recording platform, Podcastle. We've added it into our podcasting product for everyone to use so they can record their show. This is the first time that Acast has offered any sort of podcast recording solution, and we're now able to quickly help any podcaster publish their first episode, reach their first listener, and develop their first fan. Having this in place is already proving a success with creators.
Great. We can also, as I understand it, help our creators grow their audience. How do we do that?
Yeah, sure. Again, that's one of the second key things that they're looking for, help me grow my audience and help me make more money. The way in which we find the best ways to grow audiences for all creators quickly and at scale, because bigger, more diverse, unique audiences become more attractive for advertisers, which in turn means more money for our creators and more revenue for Acast. One of the human-to-human methods that we use to grow an audience is through specific data-driven podcast growth plans that track performance over time and that leverage our partnership contacts at Apple and other listening platforms. While this work is effective, it typically requires a lot of individual human attention, and it isn't scalable to every creator.
To scale listening growth in more automated ways, we've also given podcasters better growth tools and to run experiments with these tools and their data to test, learn, iterate, and improve on our growth outcomes. Specifically with tools like our Acast Embeddable Audio Player, which allows a podcast to be added on any website, and our Acast-hosted podcast websites, which are a listener destination and a home for podcasters on the internet. This year, our product teams launched the ability for anyone to create a custom embeddable playlist, which gives podcasters even more editorial curation power to attract listeners. It's through these changes that we've noticed the listening conversion rate for our embed player steadily increase throughout 2022 from 3% to 5%. At our scale, that 2% improvement yields meaningful new listening increases.
These changes to our owned and operated properties created more listens. Podcasting benefits and has grown directly as a result of the open ecosystem. We knew we could generate even more listens by helping even more partners and platforms more easily embrace that openness and RSS technology. To start the year, Acast had an older distribution API, and while it allowed partners like Amazon Music to receive podcasts once they were added to our catalog, it wasn't particularly efficient or scalable. With dozens of new podcasting platforms popping up all the time and existing attention economy companies wanting to include podcasts because they understand how engaged listeners are with the medium, we needed to do something. To improve scalability, we created a new, more modern distribution API, which allows us to connect with many more partners and to do so more quickly.
Now we see consumer destinations like Podchaser, Samsung, and TikTok owner ByteDance taking advantage of this new API, and we can already attribute 10 million listens from the integrations via this API with millions more new listens each month, and we're adding more partners all the time.
All right. Great. Thank you, Matt. So we talk a lot about the pod creators now and how they grow their audience and make money, but actually our main revenue at Acast is from the ad sales, and we've done a lot to ensure that we can scale this, which supports both, of course, Acast and the podcasters. Could you just explain a little bit more to us how this has evolved and where we are today?
Yeah, exactly. As we entered 2022, we were focused on hypergrowth, improving our capabilities across the board, and making investments to secure future market positioning and to attract as much supply as we could. For the first few months of 2022, we saw material meaningful impact on our efforts to scale the supply side of our marketplace. As we saw that success and our new automated, scalable, and efficient methods kept attracting podcasters, we started to shift our attention, resources, and importantly, our product-led scalable process to the demand side, the ad side of our marketplace. Just to be clear, we took what we saw working on the supply side, and now we've brought the same people and same approach to now enhance the advertising side of our podcast marketplace.
We're shifting gears and more tightly focusing our efforts on ads-related activities and capabilities, which very much supports our path to profitability. Critical to getting this done is providing the infrastructure to effectively scale how we sell, manage, and deliver sponsorships, direct ads, and programmatic advertising, putting more money in the hands of our podcasters and, of course, Acast. Now more than ever, we're focusing on ensuring that every ads demand lead generated has the best chance of being converted into a sale.
It's critical that we effectively convert the demand that we're already seeing from advertisers. To do that in the latter half of Q2 and Q3, our teams have been focused on providing a more efficient way to match our podcast inventory to the requests coming in from the demand side, our advertisers, which has resulted in more strategic campaign planning across the board and a higher percentage of briefs/contracts won. We're also staying focused on our bread and butter core ad tech, increasing our ability to control how and to whom we deliver impressions. While focused on hypergrowth, we also built on future bets like a new self-service platform for advertisers to directly buy and run ads across Acast inventory. We've just opened up this self-service tool to advertisers on an invite-only basis. We're also looking at revenue-enhancing quick wins in the short term.
In particular, how we can use algorithms to automatically increase available inventory for Acast to sell and to improve margins across the board. Finally, we've optimized our external advertiser lead generation tool to deliver more and high-value leads to our sales team, and optimizations on our advertiser page on Acast.com have seen 10 times as many monthly inbound leads for our U.S. team. As we move toward profitability, we'll continue to balance our approaches, ensuring that we're investing in new market-leading capabilities that will secure our ability to attract higher-value advertising clients at scale, while also identifying where quick wins can be made through core ad tech experiments or automations of sales processes to accelerate the demand and conversion of ad spend in the immediate term.
All right. You mentioned Acast+. This is a subscription service for premium users, right? I was just curious a bit more detail there what's going on.
Yeah, sure. While monetizing via ads is the bread and butter and represents the vast majority of our revenue, Acast Plus is our suite of monetization options for creators, giving them the ability to offer recurring subscriptions, so podcast fans can pay monthly for more of the content they love, and also for one-time payments for things like a limited series or a one-off special. These additional options to make money beyond ads are becoming expected by creators, and Acast having them becomes an additional value proposition to attract and retain valuable podcasters like WTF with Marc Maron and Shagged, Married, Annoyed in the UK. One last note here, that with Acast Plus, we as Acast are not responsible for driving user growth.
We've built and given creators a tool for them to do so to build and convert their audience into a paying subscriber, and therefore, user acquisition is not a cost driver for us.
Great. Final question for you, like, for Ross, how does Podchaser fit into all this?
Yeah, sure. On the short-term horizon, we're gonna be focused on how Podchaser can help Acast toward our existing business goals and objectives, specifically by enhancing the capabilities that we need, such as increasing our ad sales by generating inbound ad leads, packaging and selling more shows by using Podchaser metadata to enhance our advertiser content matching with our Acast sales planning tools, and directing even more ads towards more shows by utilizing Podchaser metadata to improve existing ad targeting or bringing new ad targeting capabilities to market, as well as increasing Acast+ memberships by promoting their Podchaser marketing landing pages. Of course, these are just some of the opportunities that we identified prior to acquiring Podchaser. As we speak, our two teams are talking all the time to expand on these ideas and to uncover new and additional opportunities.
Last point here. The culmination of Acast and Podchaser creates an incredible opportunity for future value creation for both businesses. This acquisition was far more than just a one-way street of value extraction from Podchaser to Acast. We see the relationship as a true flywheel of value creation that benefits both Acast, Podchaser, and the entire open ecosystem, including podcasters, listeners, and of course, advertisers. A concrete example of this flywheel in action, Acast is now providing listening, demographic, and reach data back to Podchaser to improve the quality and fidelity of information about Acast shows on Podchaser. Also that same data helps Podchaser algorithms improve their estimation models about the entire industry, which in turn will help make Acast shows more discoverable for both listeners and advertisers.
Some additional examples of this value exchange include episode transcriptions, Acast shows, which enhance discoverability, brand spend identification, and to reduce Podchaser's own transcription costs, providing past and current advertisers of shows, and providing contextual and audience segment data so to help enhance discovery of media planning insights for advertisers, and providing verified listens to improve reach reporting accuracy. Again, these are just a handful of the identified opportunities for how Acast can add value by helping to improve the quality of data on Podchaser and for how that improved data on Podchaser will help Acast. I think the potential synergies between the two companies are endless, and I know that everyone at both Acast and Podchaser are looking forward to exploring these further.
Right. Great. Thank you so much, Matt. This was all very interesting, and we are ready for some questions from our audience. I would also like to actually invite Ross Adams again to this in case there are questions for him as well. We have a first question from the message board here from Lars. You said earlier that there are a lot of players in the podcasting space, and those that will win are those that offer the best tools and services. Can you explain how we're doing with this at the moment?
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. first we've always been at the forefront of building industry-changing products from when we pioneered dynamic ad insertion in podcasting right through to now with advancements such as Acast Plus and our AI-powered conversational targeting. This last year has also seen us forge partnerships with new partners with Apple Podcasts, Meta, LELO, Spring, Focusrite, Samsung Free, Podcastle. There's a pretty long list there. To offer even more value to creators and opportunities for them to grow their shows and to make more money. All of this combined with our collective expertise makes us, Acast, a pretty unbeatable proposition for creators of all sizes.
Great. Thank you. We also have a couple of questions from Derek at ABG. First question: In the U.S. market, what segment of podcasters is your go-to source for new clients? And what type of pods don't you go after? How do you track them? What type of contracts do you offer these in broad terms? And do they take advantage of your full product slate?
Yeah. I'll probably grab the first part of that. In terms of the type and the segment of podcaster that we're going for I mentioned this earlier in the call that at the start of the year, really it was about, let's open the floodgates, let's build automated methods to attract as many podcasters as we can across that entire spectrum that Ross showed of, like, the head, the heart and the tail.
You know, as we have shifted more toward this pathway toward profitability and become much more focused on the ad side of our marketplace, we've become much more targeted in how it is that we approach and think about the type of podcaster that that is going to be attractive to an advertiser, that an advertiser is going to reach out to. If you remember looking back at sort of that purple and pink or purple and blue, I don't remember the colors exactly on the slide that Ross showed about sort of those shows that are kind of not currently monetized. You know, we're doing a lot of work from a product perspective to both identify those shows and kind of move them through that monetization process.
Sort of the general way in which I would characterize this is that at the start of the year, it was, let's bring any and all, as many new podcasters and podcasters onto the platform as possible. Now we're being much more targeted and specific in the type of podcaster that we're bringing on.
Great. Purple lines are the non-monetized.
Purple lines. Great.
Yes. One more question from Derek at ABG. There are other podcast hosters offering international dynamic ads on US shows. What is your edge versus these?
Yeah. That I might toss over to Ross to talk about our sales teams in that area.
I think we're one of the only podcast companies that has grown up from Europe first. You know, a lot of the competition and landscape lies here in the US. actually listens happen absolutely everywhere. As the likes of dynamic ad insertion becomes the norm as a technology, naturally advertisers do not want wastage. If 20% of your listens, if you're a US podcaster, are happening outside of the US, which is probably the average, those go unmonetized if you work with kind of local partners. Having that international sales team, we have sales teams based in over 14 countries for us, really helped start to find local advertisers to fill that inventory up.
We have a huge advantage when it comes to international and are by far the experts on that front.
Cool. One last question, I think. Yes. We talked a little bit about the Acast+. Where do you see it going the next year? Will it become a significant part of Acast revenues? If so, how much increase in marketing spend is expected to reach a critical mass of subscribers? Question from Olivia.
Yeah, I mean.
Matt, do you wanna go that one and then I'll add to it as well. You go first.
Sure. I mean, I think as I said before, we're an ads business. You know, the way in which Acast Plus sort of fits into the overall offering at this moment is really about providing sort of that complementary revenue source for podcasters that are looking for that subscription service. I think one of the key things that is unique about this type of subscription is that really all of the marketing demands and sort of the customer acquisition costs are on the podcaster to basically, find and identify and cultivate those subscribers from their own listener base. Those customer acquisition costs don't land on Acast to help them build their subscriber base.
Anything to add there, Ross?
Yeah. Yeah, no, I think it's an incredibly scalable product. Like Matt said the marketing side actually lands on the podcaster to attract their audience and their super fans to convert. You know, now with the macroeconomic crisis, of course, people are looking at their expenditure when it comes to the likes of subscription services. You still will get that group of fans that will convert and want more entertainment and more content from their favorite podcaster. That will only grow over time. You know, I think that obviously the macroeconomic crisis will affect that growth. I don't necessarily feel long term that this is gonna be overtake the likes of ad revenue. Ad revenue is the number one revenue source for podcasters.
You know, it still will be very significant, depending on what podcast is using it. We're very excited about how scalable this is as a product.
Cool. We have one, actually, we have two more questions. One is from Richard, who is asking, "Is DAI applied in the majority of campaigns? Is it a default option?" Quite specific.
Yeah. I mean, dynamic ad insertion is something, as we talked about, I talked about earlier, we invented and that's the kind of first step to digitize this analog medium or otherwise was an analog medium. Everything we do, even from host reads, are dynamically inserted as well. While they are read within the show and sound natural within the show, they're still dynamically inserted, and that allows trackability and accountability for advertisers rather than waiting for a download report at the end of a certain term. Yeah, everything for us is dynamically ad inserted. There are different kind of when you talk about sponsored stories and lots of different branded content a lot of those, kind of formats are within the show.
Definitely, ads and our host reads are majority DAI. Yes.
Cool. One last question from Emily on Acast+. Can you please remind us of the economic split and monetization of this?
Yeah. You know, we can obviously give guidance to our podcasters as to how and where they should be setting their levels of subscription. You know, ad-free can be a certain price, $2.99 or something like that. But essentially, we're taking a 15% cut here. The podcaster gets paid direct, and we take that as a pure net amount of the overall there. It's a very scalable product. We don't have to do the marketing for it. You know, you just sign up to it, and you can click ad-free, and you can open a tier up straight away. It's a very exciting product for us. Emily, I'm sure, will talk about the monetization side in her part as well.
Cool. No more questions. Thank you so much, Matt and Ross.
Thank you. Next coming up is Elli Dimitroulakos, but now some time for you. Welcome back, and welcome, Elli Dimitroulakos. How are you?
I'm good. Hello. It's good to be here.
Nice. How does Acast make money by providing the framework, the marketplace where creators and advertisers connect? This is where you come in, Elli.
Yes. Yes.
The Global Head of Ad Innovation.
That's correct.
Tell us about yourself and your role at Acast.
Yes. I help lead Acast sales offering as the global head of ad innovation. My focus here is to help turn innovation into complete ad sales package tools that allow the Acast global sales team and our advertising partners to get the most of what they need from our marketplace, and of course, for our podcasters to make more money from their craft. Part of my role is to help ensure that Acast marketplace and our sales team have adopted the right strategy for our ad sales products and for the future of podcasting.
Okay. Could you tell us a few things about the Acast marketplace?
I'd be happy to. The Acast marketplace is where we connect advertisers to podcasters with the intent to deliver targeted, effective ad campaigns. It's within this marketplace where our expert ad sales teams, the leading authorities in podcasting, eat, live, and breathe podcasts. They do a really remarkable job at constantly adapting to the rapidly changing demands in podcasting within 14 markets globally. In essence, we can think of them as matchmakers. They bring together the right podcasters with the right listeners and the right audiences. As you'll see here, within our marketplace, we have three industry-leading service pillars. The Acast Intelligence team is our business intelligence division. Their job is to help shape podcast campaigns through the use of data, research, and insights.
Our Acast Creative team is our in-house creative expert team that helps these brands create the very best audio experience for our podcasters and their listeners across all ad formats. We have the Acast Automated team. This is the industry's leading programmatic advertising experts, and we enable advertisers to plan, buy, and optimize media in real time and at scale through the use of programmatic technology. For those of you who aren't sure what programmatic is, don't worry, we'll explain a bit more very soon. Within the marketplace and under the ad, the services I just mentioned, we offer a range of ad formats, which Ross touched on earlier, each of which can be tailored depending on your needs.
Within that, we've designed and built the most, and in some cases, partnered with independent vendors to offer the most advanced targeting and measurement capabilities for podcasting with the intent that every advertiser can reach the right listener at the right time and with the right creative messaging. With each of these innovations, we've been able to unlock new revenue sources. Within the targeting specifically, we can dive a bit deeper and take a look at how we enable advertisers to target specific podcast listeners based on four core buckets. Firstly, we have our curated collection. This is a grouping of podcasts curated by Acast experts, and it's based on core common themes. This could be things like comedy and sports, lifestyle or beauty. Within this bucket, advertisers can target the most relevant category for their message.
One of our big bets has been to develop new innovative targeting capabilities called conversational targeting, which enables advertisers to target subject matter discussed down at the individual episode level, so they can reach audiences with even more relevant messages at the right time. We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the shows, and then we match the shows back to each individual episode against the industry-wide standards of IAB categories. Within here, we can also enable individual keywords. The reason this is really important is because it leans into the unique capabilities of contextual advertising within audio content, as well as enhancing the advertising relevancy for listeners. All of this is really in a privacy-centric way, which is safeguarded against any changes around data privacy legislation.
An example of this would be a comedy interview podcast that you listened to recently, where the majority of the time was spent speaking about cooking, their favorite pasta dish, and their favorite food. Based on standard targeting, we would tag that advertising opportunity as comedy. Within conversational targeting, we surface the contextual relevancy of that conversation, and it allows us to identify that this conversation is more about food and cooking, which really opens up the opportunity for, let's say, a food brand who'd want to hyper-contextually target within hyper-contextually relevant advertising. Then thirdly, we have third-party data offering, which is the aggregation of third-party data through our data management platform. Within this targeting feature, we're able to locate a specific listener or listener attribute. An example of this would be looking for someone in the market for an Audi.
Finally, with all the scale and targeting, brands really want to ensure that they can protect their brand image and their reputation from questionable and inappropriate content. While at Acast, we're not in the business of censorship, and we will always support free speech, we do understand that not all content is suitable for every advertiser. We launched the first-of-its-kind brand safety product for podcasting. We did this in collaboration with the trusted media measurement and analytics company, Comscore. We call this product the brand suitability product. With this product, we were able to remove another barrier to entry for buying audio ads. This feature analyzes the words and the frequency of the words spoken within the conversations and is able to separate and place the episode within varying degrees of risk levels.
This way, we can differentiate, for example, between a bomber jacket and a bomber referencing violence. We continue to evolve our marketplace, thanks to the rich data we sit on, especially after the recent acquisition of Podchaser. This is to enhance our advertiser offering even further and to enable advertisers to harness the power of their own data to make decisions on media. More than 60% of media budgets in the U.S. are bought using first-party data, and the lack of a capability of this kind in podcasting really was a major barrier to entry, especially for advertisers within certain vertical spaces like retail. Acast is currently in a position to service and support these budgets that previously would not be allocated towards podcasting. We have a series of further launches expected to be released in the following quarters around targeting and data specifically.
Many interesting things. Looking at the bigger picture, what can you tell us about the market size for podcast advertising?
The podcast market is very much in its infancy. Despite being around as long as it has been, from an advertiser's perspective, it's still very much considered an emerging platform. We can think of it like the likes of virtual reality and gaming, or dare I say it, the metaverse. Podcasting has proven to be a disruptive technology to traditional radio, meaning that the change in consumer consumption habits is allowing podcasting to emerge as the new radio type, very much like what connected TV was to cable and broadcast. When we look at the market size, we believe that global podcast advertising will be worth between $4 billion-$6 billion in the next 3-5 years, and it's currently growing at a rate of 15% annually.
What's quite impressive is that within this timeframe, programmatic ad spend experienced a 70% CAGR in the last three years, and it's expected to reach a whopping $1 billion in revenue by 2026. That's a powerful growth trend, which is why we'll dive a bit deeper into programmatic at a later section. What's most interesting is that when we look at the advertising market, we discover that audio, and especially podcasts, are massively undervalued. In this recent survey with GWI of more than 715,000 consumers, we see that social media is forecasted to account for 39.1% of 2022 ad spend, but has a share of daily media consumption of only 21.4%. That's a serious discrepancy and equivalent in value to $94.3 billion more than the channel's equal share.
Linear TV is forecasted to account for 31.5% share of advertising spend next year, compared to only 16% of share of daily media consumption. Yet in audio, while consumers spend 31% of their media time, brands only allocate 8.8% of their budgets, and 25% are missing from audio entirely. Perhaps most notably is that podcasts are found to be undervalued at about $40 billion. When we look at this, we see a huge gap between what advertisers are spending in podcast and audio and what the reality is of daily consumption, and this is what we've been building the Acast marketplace to support over the course of time.
Wow. That is quite a gap. Why do you think that is?
Well, I think it's mostly because the media landscape is very complex, and when you're an emerging platform, it adds an additional layer to this complexity because the full potential is only just being realized, and not to mention, podcasts and Acast, for that matter, are both challengers of the status quo. They're disruptors and really the new kids on the block. If we take a look at the most recent audio landscape, you'll see that there are hundreds of different partners we service at any given moment, from direct response agencies to independents, to advertisers themselves, larger media holding groups and ad tech vendors globally. Within that, there are dozens of targeting and measurement and attribution vendors, not to mention the industry governing bodies that are focused on building standards.
Podcast media is, in essence, forcing a whole industry to change behavior and restructure their organizations so that they can change existing beliefs and lean more into podcasting. Basically, podcasts are revolutionizing radio the same way digital revolutionized media and the same way CTV did for TV. Within this, Acast is a leader when it comes to monetizing podcasts, and we have a great position to make money as that market evolves, and we'll continue to help propel that evolution. Earlier, I compared podcasts to CTV because the reality is the cord cutters of CTV are pretty much the same audiences that are driving growth and listenership in podcasting. At Acast, we've noticed that the heavy TV media investors have found opportunities to extend their reach and diversify their media budgets by way of podcasting, not to mention podcast drive results.
When you look at that earlier comparison of CTV, the reality is. It'll take that evolution of CTV 13 years to see serious investments coming in from advertisers. Podcasting is a bit different, really because the innovation today grows at a faster, rapid speed than it did 15 years ago, so that's pretty important. Additionally, podcast discovery and creator tools that Matt mentioned earlier make this barrier to entry much lower for creators and listeners. We can generate more content and at a higher speed than any other medium. It's far easier to launch a podcast than it is to launch a TV series or produce a film. As Ross mentioned earlier, the open ecosystem is in essence democratization of consuming podcasts and alleviates another barrier to entry that we experience in TV.
We can listen to podcasts anywhere on any device across any app. Podcasts come with us everywhere we go, whereas CTV services only operate in certain local markets. There's limitations there. Lastly, but certainly not least, podcasts give a powerful platform to diverse voices, particularly those in marginalized communities that are attracting and we're attracting coveted audiences that have historically been hard to find, but mostly are also difficult to connect with. Something that podcasts solve for organically, just through the sheer power of its true, genuine connection between listener and host. All of this is really just to say that Acast is seeing serious investments coming to podcasts in almost half the time that's taken to see this change in CTV, which is incredibly exciting and powerful.
Thank you. If you look at the comparison with CTV, what has been the evolution of the Acast marketplace in this timeframe?
Yeah. In the early days, podcasters and media buyers really embraced sponsorship and host reads. These are the formats that they really help propel podcasts and put them on the map. The reality is these ads offer the ability to fit naturally into the conversation, and they have a custom tone and script of each ad that is immersive as if the advertiser were actually in the room with the host. In many cases, they are. The early adopters of podcast buying were mainly direct response agencies and advertisers in certain verticals such as finance and business, entertainment, and direct to consumer. The way they processed their media campaigns was to choose a select few hosts, primarily based on audience size and popularity, and recognition.
They bought sponsorship and host reads nationally to promote their brand or service, and then would measure direct impact through traditional means of direct response. All of this made a lot of sense at the time, and when you combine the level of engagement with the listeners and the hosts, that native storytelling power of sponsorship ads really enabled listeners to take action, which in turn started to shift gears in the attention we were getting from advertisers. While sponsorships still make up a healthy percentage of ad spend, what we're noticing is these advertisers and these agencies are looking now to enhance their scale and reach in what has already been a very successful media campaign. We're noticing new advertisers and agency holding companies have begun to test podcasts, and the early adopters are leaning much more into audio ads.
They're choosing audio ads to scale the traditional media buying methods that they've incorporated up until now. They use traditional media buying activation methods called direct, which means that there's a lot of manual effort required to plan, to approve, to purchase, and ultimately measure the effectiveness of these campaigns at scale. When we started to see these shifts, we knew that this was not scalable in the long term. In 2017, we pioneered Acast Automated. This is the first global independent programmatic marketplace for podcasting. It's been our fastest-growing buying channel globally. Currently, around 10% of our global ad revenue is transacted programmatically. This is significantly higher than the market predictions of 4%-6%. In some of our more established markets, such as the UK and Australia, this percentage is much higher.
We began with this effort to see that our ad dollars were shifting from direct side of our business into the programmatic side of our business. We also started to see hundreds of new advertisers advertising within the Acast marketplace for the first time. In particular, the power of discoverability has been benefited tremendously through programmatic. It often helps surface content from underrepresented voices that historically may get overlooked due to their small size and anonymity when buying sponsorships. In essence, we're democratizing access to revenue for many more customers, both big and small. Despite the U.S. being in relatively early stages, Acast has earned already five awards in the last two years by renowned and respected industry voices, AdExchanger and AdMonsters, for the use of innovation and data and technology for audio ads, harnessing the power of programmatic and audio.
All right. Congratulations to the awards. Early on, you promised to tell us what programmatic means. What's the difference between programmatic and the more traditional method of buying called direct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Direct. Yes. The formal definition of programmatic advertising is the use of technology, real-time data, and algorithms to serve ads to the right listener at the right time and at the right place. The technology, in essence, automates many of the manual campaign activities of media buying that are necessary when buying direct. This includes negotiations, trafficking, reporting, optimizations, targeting, and billing. This is why we call programmatic Acast Automated because in reality, it's just an automated way to buy media. I actually like to use an example of the stock market because programmatic has in essence been built on the same instantaneous stock market technology. The same way you'd utilize a broker who uses technology to visualize and decide on which stocks to buy, when, and at what price, is the same way that media buyers plan and buy media using programmatic.
This is a visual representation of the actual programmatic tech stack. On one side of the transaction, you have the publisher, which in our case is Acast. Acast uses a supply-side platform or an SSP, and that SSP aggregates our supply and then puts that supply into what is called an ad exchange. The ad exchange is where buyers find our supply and also all other supply they're currently buying, which could include display and video, CTV, social media, et cetera. On the other end, we have the advertisers, and they're using what's called a demand-side platform to access this supply and to have a holistic view of the total universe of media they're purchasing. The DSPs have very sophisticated targeting capabilities.
They use algorithms and artificial intelligence to help inform buyers in real-time, they automate the operations of the campaigns so that buyers can reach the right users in the right place at the right time and with the right creative messaging. By using the DSP, advertisers have in essence removed the majority of operational tasks that would be required in direct buying and can then focus on managing performance and optimization in real time, making them, in essence, and all their campaigns more effective, maximizing return on ad spend, and minimizing ad dollar waste. When we look at the deal types in programmatic, there are four primary ways to buy, or as we call them, deal types. The podcast supply as a whole is currently only available in private marketplaces, and Acast currently offers two of these deal types.
The first two are the open auction and private auction deals that would allow any buyer to come and enter the supply and buy with no guardrails. The latter two are called preferred or PMPs and programmatic guaranteed deals. These are private-only invites. It's one deal between one advertiser and Acast, and these are the two deal types we currently have enabled in our marketplace. The difference between PMPs and programmatic guaranteed is that for PMPs, the spend level is not guaranteed, and it ebbs and flows based on performance in real time, whereas programmatic guaranteed is a prenegotiated and guaranteed spend level between Acast and an advertiser. These deal types in our private marketplace give us a bit more control around things like creative evaluation, advertiser approvals, pricing controls, and yield management.
Most importantly, though, we're able, through these deal types, to respect the preferences of our podcasters by ensuring we match the right advertiser to their content, and we're also able to protect the intimacy of the experience by managing any potential intrusive or misaligned creatives. All of this is really to say that programmatic automates the media buying process.
Programmatic is quite intricate. It seems to be the preferred way to buy audio ads. What other predictions do you have for us today?
I might not say right now that it's the preferred way of buying audio ads just quite yet, but it will be as the market sees the benefits of real-time optimization, measurement capabilities, and return on ad spend, especially as they're seeking to scale. Sponsorship and host reads will still make up a very healthy percentage of investments, and at Acast, this trend continues to grow. As the ads we're looking at offer that scale, that is how we're gonna close the gap we explored earlier. Here's where we're best positioned as the industry leader to help advertisers and agencies scale their advertising budgets. Until now, Acast has been building and evolving to create a sustainable future-proofed technological foundation through our ad sales marketplace. We've experienced revenue growth and growth in new advertisers and agency partners from various verticals.
Revenue trends highlight that we're still in a test and learn phase, but with the effects of the economy, we understand that advertisers might be a little less risk-averse and revert back to tried and tested methodologies. Despite this, demand for podcasting has been growing faster than any other medium, and we see major change in ad spending, especially in the U.S. This is where the Acast marketplace will truly be able to harness its true power. Scale and transparency will continue to be important, both for Acast and the industry. This is an area where we, in many ways, are ahead of others. From a brand safety perspective, we'll continue to see evolution here that starts to present independent brand safety measures and standards in the marketplace. This will allow for independent auditing because really it's not ideal to mark your own homework.
Advertisers will begin to truly embrace contextual and conversational targeting. They'll shift media dollars away from platforms of social media using third-party data, and they'll lean more into privacy and data legislation, forcing budgets away from other marketplaces and into contextual targeting. The death of the cookie will mean that the industry will work tirelessly to create a unified ID solution for audience targeting, and they will harness more privacy-centric first-party data solutions, both of which we're positioned to support at this time. Improved and holistic measurement attribution technologies will emerge, with a focus on podcasting and the tech it is powered by, so that advertisers can audit and confirm which podcast every impression was served on, what audience was reached, which creative resonated the best with their audience, and what drove performance.
Then finally, we have macroeconomics, the effects of which we're already feeling as an industry, and our CFO, Emily, will be touching a bit more on that next. Overall, the Acast marketplace is the most trusted and advanced offering in podcast media buying globally. We've been driving results for our partners and helping our podcasters make more money for their craft for years. While this area will continue to improve and evolve, the foundational work is really there for the Acast marketplace and its pilot is up until now, and we're very, very well positioned for the future.
Okay. Thank you, Elli. Thank you so much. We are ready for some questions, yes?
Yes.
Elli and Ross.
Yeah, I think we have Ross there with you to join you. Of course, you can queue up for questions through the telephone conference if you like. Otherwise, feel free to post your questions in the message board on your screen. We have a first question here from Sarah, who is wondering where do you see the market for the programmatic ads going in the coming year, given that we have a challenging macro?
I guess that's a question for me.
Yeah.
I can't comment too much on the marketplace in general, but what we do know is that in the last 3 years, programmatic has grown 70%, and it's estimated and forecasted to reach $1 billion by 2026. We do see that this is a massive opportunity for monetization and scalable solutions, especially through the power of audio ads.
Yeah. I also think that during a macroeconomic downturn, this is where advertisers need to be efficient with what they spend, and buying programmatically helps them create efficiencies.
Oh, there is even an upside then in a macro downturn. Good to know. Great. Thank you for that. There is a question here from Emily. Can you give a sense of what percentage of campaigns and/or ad sales are targeted under each of the four buckets that you mentioned, curated collections, audience targeting, et cetera?
I mean, that differs by market, and I think Emily can touch on some of that data in her part in a more granular way. Yeah, it does depend by market on exactly which sectors are being bought. You know, podcasts in some markets are being bought just by podcast. That's the early kind of adoption markets. Then they're bought by verticals, and then eventually they'll be bought by audience. It does depend what market we're talking about here, but Emily can touch on some of that data.
All right. We have one more question for you, Elli, I think. You touched upon it before. Why do you think the market value of podcast advertising is so low compared to other media, such as TV, social media, or radio?
I think it's just because it's an emerging platform, and it's overlooked, quite honestly. Once an advertiser starts to delve into podcasting, and they see the power that it harnesses, they lean much faster into it. We're also up against TV, which is the lion's share of media budgets, so we always have to overcome those obstacles. Research and data has shown that, podcasts deliver results, and it's a much more stronger medium. Time spent here is exponentially higher than any other medium, and it's likened to that of influencer marketing with the added caveat that the attention level in podcasting is extremely high. It's a very, very powerful medium, and the only reason it's really overlooked, I think it's because of perception and it being a new emerging platform that is still being developed.
Yeah. It will take a lot of education as well and the great thing is we have all of the major players who play within audio programmatic, playing in that arena. You know, a rising tide will raise all boats, and everyone is educating the buyers around what programmatic can be in podcasting. We look forward to seeing how that progresses.
Certainly. One more question from Dennis at Carnegie. Would it be possible to clarify or quantify Acast's leading edge within programmatic? What do you have or offer that your competitors lack?
I love this question.
Good.
Well, first off, we have the advantage of doing it first. We launched it many years ago in international markets, and we've gathered years and years of research and best practices across different markets, including the nuances within those markets. The second huge differentiator is the fact that our technology has been built for podcasting. It is not legacy technology built for something else. It's not disparate. What that means is it's not fragmented. When you're a media buyer and you're trying to buy audio and streaming and podcasting, that fragmentation doesn't give you transparency, so that you can actually learn from the media campaign and scale from it and just be more effective with the media buy. Within the Acast marketplace, there is no fragmentation, and that transparency is there from day one.
Media buyers can cherry-pick, can customize, can create very custom campaigns to them for their brands. Moreover, they can measure that in real-time and understand what's working and what's not. Those are the two major differentiators. I think a third differentiator is because we're first to market, we're able to innovate with our partners and create further scale, further transparency, and in many ways have been doing that ahead of the curve while others are sort of solving for some of the solutions I just mentioned earlier.
I think conversational targeting rolled into programmatic well is super exciting, unlocking kind of new conversations that brands want to be amongst, and doing that through AI is super exciting. That's another advantage we have.
Great. Thank you so much, both of you. I think those were the questions that we had. What are we gonna do now? Look at a film again, I think.
Yes, we are.
Yeah. All right. Welcome back. We are at the very exciting part of this presentation, which will be talking to you, Emily Villatte, our CFO, who hopefully is now going to make everything crystal clear how this translates into money, right?
I'll certainly try.
Great. All right. In terms of what we have achieved to date, from a financial standpoint, what would you say are the main accomplishments?
All right, let's start with the accomplishments. Of course, first, we have created a marketplace with reach and scale. Without that, we're not going to attract advertisers. Having attracted the 66,000 podcasters Matt spoke about that have a strong commercial value and are generating over 1.2 billion listens each quarter is also a notable achievement. The fact that we've built a proposition for creators that is attractive enough to make them want to build their business with Acast has to be highlighted. In fact, our proposition has become so valuable that we have earned the right, and I say earned the right, to a healthy gross margin in the high 30s% while still being able to pay out over $200 million to our podcasters since inception. I think we should be proud of that.
because one way to play in this space is to buy content, to buy IP. That's not been our play. I think in essence, the value of any podcast platform's proposition is reflected in the gross margin. Now, we do have a track record of delivering strong revenue growth across our markets, as you can see here, in Europe, the Americas, and internationally. Of course, we have taken market share. That's because we've outperformed the general podcasting ad market since our start in 2004, and are of course, intending to do so even if we are not in that state of hyper-growth right now. When it comes to investments, we've gone through a heavy investment period in the business.
As you can see on the slide, we've invested in our geographical expansion and have boots on the ground in 14 markets. We've also invested heavily in developing our product offering. You heard from Matt and from Ellie the great strides that we have made. I think you also heard from them that in this space, we've been playing the long game. We acknowledge the fact that we have been forward-leaning in terms of our investments, and now the time has come for us to focus on our path to profitability and beyond. Finally, in terms of achievements, we did secure the company's financing last year through our IPO, and we do have the privilege of a strong balance sheet. This is indeed a privilege, and we treat that capital with great care.
I want to be very clear here as well, we do not intend to raise further capital to fund our organic growth journey through to, profits. I just wanna be clear on that point.
Great. Thanks. That's a good overview of what we have achieved so far. Of course, we're curious about the future and where we're heading.
Of course, we're entering into a new growth phase for this company, and we are experiencing a different economic climate compared to the same time last year. This is precisely why we have updated our financial targets. Let's have a look at these. Firstly, of course, we've set out to achieve organic net sales growth of between 40%-45% in the period 2020-2025. What that implies, as you can see here on this slide, is an average organic growth rate of 30% between 2022 and 2025. This does take into consideration the economic climate that we're in and the pending recession, and we are making the assessment that near-term growth comes in below the 30% average, and the growth exceeds 30% towards the end.
Again, an average of 30% growth over the period 2020 to 2025 is what we are targeting. We've set a range for a gross margin target of 35%-38%. This also acknowledges the economic cycle we're in and where higher advertising activity, higher utilization of our ad inventory can drive up our gross margin towards that 38% point, whereas the current climate is putting some pressure on the gross margin. When it comes to profits, we do have our sights firmly set on reaching full-year EBITDA profitability in 2024, full stop. I'll dive into that a little bit later, but I'll leave you with that cliffhanger for now, Annika.
Like cliffhangers, always exciting. So you spoke about the general economic cycle now and where we are in that and how it's impacting us. I would really like also to hear more about how your view is on how the podcasting market is being impacted by the cycle and how you see that develop.
Of course. Let's dive in. In terms of the podcasting market, what we have seen up until recently are two overarching trends. Firstly, podcast consumption and listening has been steadily increasing. Secondly, growth in advertising ad spend has been catching up with the growth in consumption. Elli spoke about the spending gap earlier and advertisers catching up, but needing some time. Let's keep those two things in mind as we apply a very simple view of how we see podcasting growth being impacted through this current economic cycle we're in. Now, I'm being very simplistic here, but bear with me. Say if we start at the beginning, in the early growth phase of the economic cycle, it's natural that advertising demand increases. What also happens when things are on the up and up is that competition for great content goes up.
What that means is that those larger creators are able to negotiate good commercial terms, which is of course natural when there is high demand. When the economic outlook is peaking and it's very positive, it's also natural that brands dare to test out new ad formats and dare to test out those new ad channels. It's a really nice place to be when you are a new medium. If we move forward and look at a time where we now start to see a slowdown in general economic activity and lower growth projections for the future. Now, podcasting as a medium has still seen really healthy outperformance of the general market and ad spending when it comes to growth. Let's just remember that all things are relative.
At this point, as we're coming out of this cycle of hypergrowth, we're seeing advertisers making a shift in how they make their buying decisions. They're still spending, and they're still spending more than they did last year in podcasting, but there are some tendencies to move towards what is known in the space and to focus on performance-based campaigns instead of deploying general spend for brand awareness. This is also why, and I think it was Emily who asked the question earlier, this is why host-read sponsorships have the potential to be a very stable and well-performing part of the podcast offering at this part of the cycle. It's traditionally been focused on those performance-based campaigns, and it's also been a tried and tested ad format for many media buyers for a number of years.
Of course, as we move through the cycle and the slowdown in the future, stocks and growth comes back, it's of course reasonable to assume that ad spend in podcasting picks up. Hopefully at that point, the ad dollar spend can really start to catch up with the level of consumption that listeners are doing. What we see throughout the cycle is that consumption keeps increasing.
All right, this is the long-term outlook then. Could you tell us more about where we are actually right now in this cycle?
Yes, of course. If we take just a short step back and look at where we were at when we entered 2022, we're coming out of this phase of hypergrowth, and we start to see a slight slowdown in advertiser spend in Europe. Now, don't get me wrong, we were still growing at 51% at that time, but that was not as fast as the year before. Everyone knows the story. Russia had invaded the Ukraine, and inflation fears were setting in. As we progressed throughout the year, we did see a slowdown in revenue growth in the Americas as well, and they are not immune to the macroeconomic environment.
In terms of ad product mix during this time, our sponsorship revenue has provided a stable foundation for growth, whereas those audio ad sales or the ad side has proven to be a little bit more cyclical. What we have seen as Acast during this period and where we're at right now is that consumption is picking up. We have seen an acceleration in how many shows are joining our platform, and we've seen an acceleration in listening. Right now, fundamentals are very strong.
That's great. I think our shareholders in the audience today are equally interested in hearing what you're doing right now and your plan for success in the near term.
Absolutely. Firstly, we're going to get more from each listen. Secondly, we're going to manage our cost base. Of course, we're going to do this while not losing sight of our vision and purpose as a business, of course. For the purposes of this session today, I will focus on the first two.
All right, let's start with getting more out of each listen. How will that happen?
Okay. We are going to continue this historical journey that we've been on, where we have seen increased listening and increased average revenue per listen over time, and that has driven our net sales growth. What you can see here on the slide is literally those advertisers slowly but surely catching up with listeners and moving ad dollars into podcasting, and that trend will continue.
This, I guess, is one of the most interesting things for the external viewer is how is this revenue equation really built up in more detail. It's a lot to understand there for the externals. If you could just help us a little bit on the way.
I will try and break it down. When we break down our revenue model in a little bit more detail, we always start with the listens, of course. We have many more tools to work with than just our listens. Each podcast has a specific ad setting that means that it can take a number of ad slots or an ad load. If we multiply the listens with the available ad load, that gives us our available inventory. The sell-through rate reflects how much of our available inventory was sold, and the number of sold ads times the price gives us the net sales from ads. The price here is typically expressed as U.S. dollar CPM or cost per mille, which is the cost to buy 1,000 ad impressions or 1,000 ad slots.
Advertising revenues have, of course, made up the vast majority of our sales, but the adding the non-ad or those SaaS revenues to the equation then make up our total net sales for the company. Now, this one's for you, Emily. This is where we look at how this is broken down for Acast from 2018 to 2021. First, you can see the strong pattern in listens growth over time as podcasters and listeners have joined the platform. Yes, the growth in listens did slow down in 2021, but we've seen that accelerate again as we have entered 2022. We can also see that the average number of ad slots available or ad load has been very stable over this period.
The fact that we've seen an increase in sell-through rate between 2018 and 2021 means that advertisers are getting more into this space. The pricing or CPMs have been strong and stable. These dynamics that you can see here have resulted in a doubling of our average revenue per listen over this period, but there is room to grow further. As you can see, we have multiple levers to drive this future growth and get us there. To Ross's point earlier, even if we do not increase the number of podcasts moving forward, and therefore our total ad inventory, we'd still be able to grow our revenue from where we're at today by selling across more podcasts and by monetizing our podcast portfolio to its full potential.
All right, this is really interesting. As I see this, it's clear that the growth in listening or the increased sell-through rates has been the main drivers for this revenue growth and resulted in the ARPL. You're only selling actually less than 30% of the inventory. Why is that? Why is it not higher?
That's a good question. It has taken investment both in technology and in expertise to be able to match our great shows and audiences with the right advertisers, regardless of their size. This is where our investments in ad targeting, our programmatic offering, and our deep access to data comes into play. Of course, the acquisition of Podchaser also is right at the center of this, of helping us unlock the value from this untapped inventory. In addition, there's also a small part of the inventory that we would never sell, for example, where audiences are in a location or a market where advertisers would not sell their product there, of course. But that is a smaller part. Here, I think it's relevant to revisit the slide that Ross showed earlier.
You can literally see here the actual sell-through rate in our portfolio. Again, purple areas are where we are not currently monetizing our shows. In a sense, we have almost been too successful in building the supply side of the marketplace. As we now move from a phase of hyper-growth towards profitability, it's great to be in a position where we have this asset of untapped inventory to work with. These shows in the middle, the heart, as Ross called them, they offer really high and higher ROI for advertisers, so it is a really sweet spot. To Matt's point earlier, we have the data and tech to be able to match these shows with the right advertisers in a very scalable way.
To pick up on Elli's presentation, recalling how woefully under-monetized this medium is, having the deep expertise in markets alongside these scalable buying solutions to handle that demand as it comes through, is a very good investment to have made.
All right. You circled ad load as an important metric, of course. How do you foresee the ad loads developing? Is it going to remain stable at five, or do we have a potential to increase it?
I think in the future, there is definitely room to grow the ad load. First, of course, we work on increasing our sell-through rate. If you look at podcasting compared to other media, the general ad load in podcasting is still around a small 5% of overall time spent listening to podcasting content. Now, I don't think that we'll approach the levels of YouTube, at 25% of listening time. That could also have an impact on CPMs and on effectiveness for advertisers. Still, it's such an under-monetized media that I definitely think that there is some room to grow our ad load in the future.
Great. How about the CPMs? Some color on the development that you see.
Yeah, of course. As you can see here, podcasting CPMs are relatively high compared to other media. They typically come in at around $15-$30, which is higher than radio at $4-$8. This, of course, is because podcasting offers better audience targeting and carries higher ROI for per dollar spent. I will note as well that there is a great range of ad products that we offer, and where we're offering very basic targeting and limited targeting, those CPMs can go down to $10 or even approach the range that radio is playing in.
We also have where we have a great match between an audience, a podcast creator, and an advertiser, and we offer host-read ads, we will sell those at CPMs approaching or even exceeding $100, depending on market. It is a really big range to work with.
Great. Thank you for that. The second part of becoming profitable was to manage the costs in your business. Could we learn a little bit more about how that's going to happen?
Of course. I'll take the liberty of simplifying the elements of our cost base, and we can talk them through and see, and talk about how we see them developing over time. Now, the main element of our operating expenditure is related to our staff costs. The remaining OpEx includes the software, marketing, and rent, and so forth. The main part of our OpEx relates to staff. If we spend some time on focusing on our staffing, we have had around half of our staff operating in our local markets. You can see that in the pink and purple boxes. Our local market operations are led by local MDs. They include a local sales team and creator network teams, marketing resources, and so forth.
The creator network team, they're the ones who look after our largest creators, when they come in to record in some of our studios, just like this one. The other half of our staffing is made up of our global teams, and the largest global team is product and tech. This is, in essence, our R&D department. The remaining global functions in the blue box include the likes of ad operations, finance, the people team. They also include strategic functions related to global sales and global creator network and global marketing, as well as legal and admin.
Good, good. Thank you. With this in mind that you just explained to us and the fact that you have announced that you are actually reducing staff, could you tell a little bit more about the staffing, going forward?
What we have announced is our intention to reduce our staffing by around 15%, and that equates to around 70 staff and consultants. Now we're going through this process as we speak. We're adhering to all the local requirements and regulations in each market. It's a tough process, and I have a lot of respect for those people who are impacted. I have a lot of respect for the managers who are going through these conversations, and I have a lot of respect for our people partners who are sitting and working through this dialogue as we speak. We will go through that process in good order, and it would not be prudent for me to comment on any level of detail.
What I can say is that I do envisage that some of our global functions will be more impacted than our local markets through this process. With that in mind, and staffing reduction as a starting point, we are deploying these approaches to scale our operations effectively moving forward. If we start with our product and tech team, we have come out of this heavy period of investment, and this team is going to focus and prioritize. Right now, that means that they are focusing the majority of their efforts on the advertiser side of the marketplace. They are working on reducing friction both to buy ads from the buyer side, but also reducing friction and improving internal processes for selling these ads.
The teams, which Matt spoke about earlier, are testing all of the hypotheses that they're putting forward that drive development activity to make sure that they are spending time on things that have an impact. Overall, the capital that we allocate to product and tech and how we allocate it within that segment, is based on the yield potential of each revenue-generating product that they support. When it comes to our other global functions, I anticipate that they will scale as revenues grow, and I'm confident that we can deliver operating leverage in this area, and we have in the past as well. Now, looking at our local market organization, it is imperative that they are able to run a scalable and efficient servicing model.
We do foresee the general market for podcast advertising growing, and market growth itself does help us with our sales organization to boost scaling and become more efficient. I'll use an example. As advertisers test out the medium, they might come with a $5,000 budget, but next year they come back with $50,000, and the bigger brands can come with half a million USDs or even in the order of $1 million. That helps the efficiency of our organization. In the future, we'll see those big budgets come through, but of course, near term, some advertisers are considering, and they're mindful of the size of their advertising budgets given the macroeconomic climate, which can put pressure on sales efficiency metrics near term. It's not just external factors that drive sales efficiency.
We've spoken about the internal work streams that we are leaning on and that are focused on supporting our sales teams with tools and data to make their life and process flow with less friction. We'll continue this important work because we want our sales organization to be as successful as it possibly can be. Of course, having built these scalable solution and built the programmatic pipes will really help in efficiency as we move forward. Matt spoke briefly about the future self-serve channels, and Ross said it's early days, but of course it's another good investment to have made so that we can take on higher advertiser demand in a scalable way and increase our sales efficiency.
I do want to highlight that our local sales teams do have a track record of increasing efficiencies, and this is an illustration of what I see at a local market level. This is how our top three markets have improved their sales to sales staff cost multiple over recent years. I appreciate that this trend is not as easy to see when looking at the global sales and marketing figures because they include the local teams, not just sales, but marketing, creator network, as well as those global strategic, functions. I anticipate that, this scalability will come through more clearly moving forward as we come out of this recent period of adjustment. I hope that overview gives a little bit more clarity around how we think about, operating leverage and reaching profits.
Sure does. Thank you so much. All the others have the same question. You must answer it as well. We've made an acquisition, Podchaser, this summer. How will this impact our financial results going forward?
All right, let's talk through the Podchaser numbers. Podchaser's, of course, on a standalone basis, will contribute a few% to our overall net sales. The fact that they're a SaaS business means that they come with a high gross margin, they will support our gross margin targets moving forward. As they progress their journey towards profitability alongside Acast, they will start to generate cash before they reach EBITDA profitability. That's also just a feature of being a SaaS business. Becoming cash flow positive is something that Podchaser is aiming for next year.
Great. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Matt, Ellie, and Ross. We have some questions from the audience for you as well, Emily. First one coming from Richard. Can you talk a bit about what components within cost of goods sold are bringing pressure on gross margins? Is it hosting and operational costs of ad serving and the AI, or is it the monetization of long tail shows somewhat how structurally lower gross margin relative to brand campaigns on top-tier shows?
Ooh, let's unpack that.
Yeah.
Lots of interesting things and a couple of misconceptions that I'd like to address. The cost of data to host and listen to the shows is not a major part of our cost of goods sold. It might impact 0.5%, maybe a little bit more, and that is a small part that impacts the gross margin as listening is increasing faster than revenues. That's where we're at right now, and that's why I'm saying that this can have an impact on the gross margin in this environment. The main part that impacts our gross margin is our product mix. The sponsorships that we sell typically come at the 70-30 split, whereas the ads, whether they're sold direct or via programmatic, typically comes with a 50-50 split.
Of course, our largest creators might have some different terms in their contracts. These shows who are coming and flocking to the marketplace, they're signing up to our standard terms and conditions, and they're working with the standard splits that we have. To that point, Richard, the better we become at monetizing the head and the tail, the more support we can get for our gross margin in the future. Increasing the sell-through rate, increasing penetration through our portfolio, which is what we're setting out to do, can also support the gross margin in a future state.
Good. We have another question from Richard: How do you square the acceleration in listens and stable CPMs, plus the option to improve sell-through rates with the current forecast of slowing ad sales?
Let's just unpack that as well. We're saying that there'll still be growth. We're not saying that ad sales nominally will go down, so we're still seeing that growth. I think you're picking up on an important point, and that is that we can allow ourselves to have a little bit of flexibility with our CPMs. Of course, we have the inventory to sell. We've attracted a great range of podcasters. We've built the tech to be able to penetrate this portfolio. Definitely, that might be something that we see in the future, a little bit of flexibility on the CPMs.
Great. We have a couple of questions from Derek at ABG. First one being: In light of the fairly huge cost savings program by reduction in workforce, what functions in the organization are primarily impacted in broad terms, sales or product and tech? And what makes you confident that you will be able to grow in line with the 40%-45% target despite this reduction?
Okay. Fairly huge, it's 15%, so if you call that fairly huge, let's call it that. When I spoke about the different segments of our business, I spoke about the global teams and about our local markets. The vast majority of our sales organization sits in our local markets. I also noted that the global teams are looking as being more impacted by these changes than the global market. That implies, of course, that our sales teams will be less impacted by these changes that we are going through. Everyone is being impacted in one way or another.
The global teams are more impacted and less so the quote, "varying sales staff." We spoke about 40%-40% average organic growth over the period 2020 to 2025, and that implies 30% organic growth from 2022 to 2025. We have guided that we believe that the growth near term might just come in a little bit below the 30%, whereas it's natural for growth in podcasting to pick up with the economic cycle towards the end of that period.
The markets overall right now in podcasting is set to grow at around 15%, and we have a track record of outpacing the market, and we intend to continue to do so, especially with the investments that we have made in technology, in people and in our capabilities to be able to take this forward.
Good. Another question from Derek: What type of macro scenario is implied by the updated 40%-45% growth target?
We are looking at the overall podcasting ad market growth because podcasting is still outperforming versus the general macroeconomic environment. I, of course, look at the general macroeconomic outlook, and in advertising, we're now seeing some of those media agencies slightly reduce their growth prospects for 2023, but still posting very healthy growth. I think this year we're going to post healthy growth. Next year, we're going to post some healthy growth as well. Of course, who am I to predict exactly how those quarters are going to pan out? We're impacted by the general macroeconomic environment.
What we'd say and come back to is that we see the growth coming in slightly below that 30% near term and then above at the end of the macroeconomic cycle as it picks up towards the end of that period.
Good. Given the still low sell-through rates, are you getting any complaints from creators not being able to monetize up to their expectations? I mean, the weaker ad demand, or is there good understanding?
I think right now, it was different a few months ago, but I think right now everyone in all of the different markets are very aware of the macroeconomic circumstances. People are impacted in different ways, not just in Europe, but in the US as well. I think there's greater acceptance and acknowledgement around where the ad market in general is going right now compared to, say, three to six months ago.
Good. Thank you. Sven has a question: What is the split between increased income and decreased costs to reach profitability? What is the estimated dollar amount you'd expect to decrease costs with between 2022 and 2024? That's quite specific.
Sven, I will pass on that question. I will not give specific guidance as to exactly how our cost line will progress, but we have our sights firmly set on reaching full year EBITDA profitability in 2024. We have given you guidance on the top line and we guided in Q2 that we had reached an inflection point when it came to our EBITDA margin. Clearly, as we move from that inflection point, Q2 2022, to full year EBITDA profitability in 2024, we are not just going to see an improvement in our EBITDA margin, we're also going to see a steady improvement in nominal EBITDA losses from now until 2024. Of course, we'll have the usual seasonal impact that impacts advertising, but that is what we're going to achieve.
A steady improvement in EBITDA and taking us to profits in 2024.
Wonderful. We have no further question as it seems and, so I would just like to say thank you so much for being here and for telling this great story. Ross, I think you have some final words for the audience.
Yeah.
Before we wrap up.
I do. Thank you. Acast has been on a hyper-growth journey in line with what we had promised at the IPO last year. now as you've heard, we've reached the point in our development where we are switching focus from hyper-growth to profitability. Of course, the world right now is a little unpredictable, and that's led to a well-documented shift in how advertisers spend their money. Podcast ad spend has proven more resilient and is still expected to show healthy growth this year, but our industry is not immune to overall market sentiment. However, the longer term opportunity remains the same, to continue to build our position to take share of a large and growing addressable market where ad dollars are still catching up with the time that people spend listening to podcasts.
We've made large investments and are making strong progress on our path to becoming the largest marketplace globally for podcast monetization. We've established a unique position to leverage these technology investments and our deep industry expertise to solve the friction points of the industry at scale. The only thing we can do about market factors beyond our control is to be prepared, to be educated, and to be agile, and I think that's exactly what we're doing, acting quickly and decisively and in the long-term interests of the business and our shareholders. We have the privilege of a strong balance sheet, which we intend to protect, and a cash position which will carry us through to profitability and beyond.
I hope that what you've heard today has given you a clear picture of how Acast has built a business that is right at the very front leading the podcast universe, and that we will come out of these trying conditions in a stronger position than the majority of our competitors. Thank you.
Thank you so much, everyone, and thanks for listening in. If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to reach us, and we will reach out, and we will do our very best to respond to you as soon as we can, of course. Don't forget to sign up for our press releases or our social media channels, to follow what we're doing. Of course, you're able to speak more and listen more to Ross and Emily at our quarterly report on November the eighth. Thank you so much, and goodbye.